After an hour of picking through the mess, they found one bridge.
They hurried downstream fifty kilometers and repeated the process. Nothing. They did it again: nothing again.
On the fourth try they came up with another bridge. B Team showed up, homed in on the MS, and started mining the mud.
That first day was the only day Tania’s team caught two bridges. At the end of the seven weeks they had a total of eight bridges. B Team fared better. They had built a small town of airtight, interconnected A-frame huts: rigid silvery tents of aluminum-silicon alloy. They were in high spirits.
Tania’s team was bored and frustrated. Jacque had exploded several times and even snapped at Carol. When they huddled together for the translation back to Earth, it was with desperate relief.
29 – They Also Serve
Arnold Bates spends half his life sleeping or taking drugs. Most of the drugs are to help him get to sleep. He is a millionaire several times over, but spends little: rent and food and drugs. He has no hobbies.
When he is awake he is more awake than most people. He must be; he is Senior Controller of the LMT chamber at Colorado Springs. Its 120-centimeter crystal is the largest that AED has, and the busiest.
Bates is a short, wiry man with a shock of white hair framing Amerind features. His skin is pale for an Amerind. He looks fifty but is thirty-two years old. He has been a Controller for ten years, twice the time it normally takes to wear a person down. He has the kind of nerveless self-control that would make an ideal Tamer, but he carries too many bad genes for the job.
His stomach is made of plastic and his liver is a machine. He has an IQ of 189 and gunslinger reflexes.
His main job is to prevent another Los Alamos disaster. Two human bodies trying to occupy the same place at the same time turned a mountain into a deep valley and spread heavy fallout from Albuquerque to Mexico City.
He is looking at the first page of his schedule for today, 27 November 2051:
Jumps Returns Slack Mission Comments
06:09:14 12:38 Tau Ceti Breeding(3)
17:20
06:26:34 61 Cyg B Samples for Agr Grp
09:40
06:36:14 Procyon A Tamers (5)
06:31
06:42:45 Procyon A Floater
22:14
07:04:59 70 Ophiuchi A Tamers (6)
07:34
07:12:33 70 Ophiuchi A Floater
05:11
07:17:44 Tau Ceti Food (hurry crew)
17:43
07:35:27 Groombridge 1618 Tamers (5)
07:51
07:43:18 Groombridge 1618 Floater
04:18
07:47: 37 Groombridge 1618 Misc equipment
05:19
07:52:56 Groombridge 1618 Samples for Bio Grp,
Psy Grp (both on standby)
11:05
08:04:01 E Indi Tamers(5)
16:38 Training
He will be on today from six to ten AM and from two to six PM. The clock in the controller lounge says 05:58.
The door to the control room opens and a young man steps out. Bates has seen him off and on for almost a year, but doesn’t know his name.
“Bates,” he nods; Arnold nods back. “It’s clear now; you’ve got better’n ten minutes’ slack.” Arnold knows this, of course: ten minutes and forty-some seconds. When he opens his eyes in the morning he knows what time it is, to the minute.
The young man is pale, mopping his forehead.
“Trouble?”
“Yeah, bad one last hour. Geoformy team with three injuries, one deader. Slingshot deader.”
“Tamers,” Arnold says. “Can’t learn to keep their arms in.”
“Yeah.” He shuffles out the door and Arnold goes into the control room. His partner is Mavis Eisenstein, overlapping him on the four-to-eight shift. He’s known her for four years.
“Morning, Mavis.” She nods and sighs, gets up from the prime chair and moves over to the other one, the backup.
Arnold sits down and opens a fresh pack of cigarettes. He puts that and his old pack on the table in front of him, lights up.
“Wish you were here at five,” Mavis says. “Instead of me.”
“That’s what he said. Real mess?”
She nods, keeps nodding. “One on the bottom cut right down the middle. Even got blood on the glass. Everybody else fell all over. Coordinator and two others were unconscious anyhow. Still don’t know what happened.”